AI is, still and again and again, on everyone’s lips. But the development of AI Agents could be the real future game changer – also for the digital signage industry.
ChatGPT became widely known just two years ago. Since then, it has sparked ongoing changes in how AI will impact our lives, both now and in the future, including in everyday life and the digital signage industry. For 2025 and beyond, artificial intelligence will remain the game changer at all levels.
From the DSS ISE keynote
This article is a recap of the AI keynote that invidis experts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker held during the Digital Signage Summit at ISE. The general market update part of the keynote is summarized in this article.
It’s true that many applications titled “AI something” are pure marketing. With real, self-learning language models, it’s important to distinguish between Generative AI, which creates text, images, or video, and Analytic AI. In both areas, there’s broadening array of different models that all have unique strenghts. The ongoing competition between these models was highlighted by the Chinese solution, Deepseek, which has much lower development and operating costs, causing major turbulence in the AI stock market.
Searching for the right use case
Nevertheless, the speed of development is breath-taking. And certain areas, such as computer vision, have the potential to change the digital signage industry in the long term.
The big, still partially unanswered question is: What is the business value of AI? How can companies leverage AI to generate value?
The majority of companies are still planning to invest, even if unsure of the answers themselves. The vision might not always be clear but the recognition of the powerful tools available and the pressure to utilize them is definitely there. The search for the right use is what’s keeping the industry busy at the moment.
“Prompting Signage”
With “prompting signage,” we refer to the concept of automatically generating content for digital signage, instead of manually creating it. At the moment, it is still very much a concept, but we saw first functional examples at ISE. Read more in our big software trend article.
Enter Agentic AI
That’s where Agentic AI comes into play: AI agents are evolving from simply providing answers, like ChatGPT does, to actually getting things done.
In the new AI world, therefore, the focus is no longer on delivering quick answers but on solving tasks.
In everyday life, AI agents already handle tasks like ordering pizza or planning vacations. But what about digital signage? One interesting use case lies in network management: an AI agent could detect issues in one or more touchpoints and potentially fix them.
SaaS redefined
In our DBCI, we asked digital signage companies how they are currently using AI. The response revealed that AI is still in its early stages, with its primary applications in content creation, software development, and analytics. However, development is expected to accelerate quickly.
As in the mobile app universe, developers will unite under the umbrella of digital infrastructure providers. This would also mean the transition from software-as-a-service to service-as-a-software in the digital signage sector.
